It's getting too
late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he
inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled "Dixie" while
the banking system imploded. But it's time for Democrats to admit that
their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things
around.

He blindly followed President Bush's would-be remedy of throwing
money at the banks and getting nothing in return for beleaguered
homeowners. Sadly, Obama has proved to be nothing more than a Bill
Clinton clone triangulating with the Wall Street lobbyists at the
expense of ordinary folks.

That fatal arc of betrayal was captured by a headline in Tuesday's
New York Times: "Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on 'Lost Decade.'" The
Census Bureau reported that there are now 46.2 million Americans living
below the official poverty line -- the highest number in the 52 years
since that statistic was first measured -- and median household income has
fallen back to the 1996 level. As Harvard economist Lawrence Katz
summarized this dreary news: "This is truly a lost decade. We think of
America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're
looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was
in the late 1990s."

The late 1990s, it should be noted, is when President Clinton,
working with Phil Gramm, the Republican head of the Senate Banking
Committee, pushed through two critical pieces of legislation ending
effective regulation of the banks. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act smashed
the wall between high-flying Wall Street investment firms and the once
staid commercial banks entrusted with the deposits and mortgages of
America's innocent souls. The next year Clinton signed the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act, banning any effective regulation of the
rapidly expanded trade in the collateralized debt obligations and credit
default swaps that have since haunted the world's economy.

The collapse of those toxic securities led to the housing crisis and
resulted in 15.1 percent of Americans now living in poverty, the same
level as when Bill Clinton took office. But thanks to another one of
Clinton's grand triangulation strategies, the one he called "welfare
reform," the impoverished are now denied the safety net that existed
before the Clinton presidency. Although 22 percent of U.S. children are
now below the poverty line, the Aid to Families With Dependent Children
program no longer exists.

Some of us who voted for Obama thought he was no Clinton, but he was
and is, as was demonstrated in his first days in office when he
appointed two key veterans of the Clinton Treasury Department, Lawrence
Summers and Timothy Geithner, to head up the Obama economic team.
Geithner, as treasury secretary, is the point man for the
administration's push to pass the so-called American Jobs Act, which the
president hyped in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress and the nation. It
was pure Clinton bull: I feel your pain while I help the super-rich pick
your pocket.

Space permits only one example, that of General Electric CEO Jeffrey
Immelt, whom Obama selected to head his "Jobs Council of leaders from
different industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to
help companies grow and create jobs." Was that some cruel joke? GE under
Immelt has grown and created jobs, but they are abroad rather than in
our own troubled country. As a result, by the end of last year, only
134,000 of GE's workforce of 304,000 were based in the United States;
the remainder -- and 82 percent of the company's profit -- were sheltered
abroad.

Ironically, GE's ability to avoid taxes was restricted by President
Ronald Reagan, who had once been a spokesman for GE but was outraged by
the company's use of tax loopholes. It remained for President Clinton to
offer GE some new tax breaks. As a result of being able to shelter
profit abroad last year, GE had profits of $14.2 billion but claimed a
tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Immelt was the elephant in the room when
Obama said in his speech last week: "Our tax code should not give an
advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists. It
should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs right
here in the United States of America."

It has been a long time since GE was creating jobs here during its
"better light bulb" days, and the last spurt of GE participation in the
U.S. economy came through its unit GE Capital, which specialized in
toxic mortgage lending that once produced more than half of the
company's profits but ultimately led to a taxpayer bailout.

Someone who knows a great deal about that sort of scam is Elizabeth
Warren, the consumer advocate and Harvard law professor pushed out of
Obama's inner circle. In launching her campaign for the U.S. Senate in
Massachusetts this week, Warren posted a video that clearly defined the
enemy:

"Washington is rigged for big corporations. A big company, like GE,
pays nothing in taxes, and we're asking college students to take on even
more debt to get an education?"

Obama in appointing Immelt last January praised him as a business
leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the
global economy." Apparently, what Immelt understands is that what it
takes to satisfy corporate interests instead of national needs is
conning a president into looking the other way while you send jobs
abroad.

http://www.truthdig.com

Robert Scheer is editor in chief of the progressive Internet site Truthdig. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter (more...)